


de minimis non curat lex

by mahariels



Series: all your bridges are burning [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Jewish Character, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 01:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5520026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahariels/pseuds/mahariels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>the law does not concern itself with the little things.</i> snapshots from a life in the commonwealth, 2052 - 2287.</p>
            </blockquote>





	de minimis non curat lex

**Author's Note:**

> fudged a few things (JAG commitments are for four years, but who knows how long it'd be in the future) for the sake of fitting everything in.

At seven, Rosa Tamar Fisher is almost entirely a small, serious face covered in freckles and mostly hidden behind coke-bottle glasses, old beyond her years. She's already skipped two grades, both with her parents' approval and against their better judgment.

At the moment she is looking up at the school counselor, who stares back down at her with an exasperated expression, because this is the third time in one month that Rosa has ended up in her office. "You are in a lot of trouble, young lady," Mrs. Jones says sharply. " _Again_."

Rosa knows she's upset but in the furious, righteous heart of her chest, she cannot, _cannot_  apologize. 

"You are in a _lot_ of trouble," Mrs. Jones repeats sharply. "Rosa, _why_ did you cut Samantha's hair?"

She remains silent. She knows exactly why she cut Samantha's hair, and it was because Samantha had called Rosa's younger brother Aaron a very bad name, a name that she doesn't even like to think about very much, because she's heard it and others so often and they hurt his feelings so much. _Retard._ She had told Samantha that if she said it again, Rosa would cut off her hair. The thick, beautiful hair she loved to toss over her shoulder. Samantha had said it again during silent study, whispered it from the corner of her mouth, and Rosa grabbed the scissors and the ponytail and _chopped_. Samantha's panicked shriek almost made up for how bad Rosa felt when she said the r-word, but not really.

But she isn't going to say anything to the counselor, because even if she did, it wouldn't matter.

"I'm going to have to suspend you," Mrs. Jones is saying. "And call your parents."

Only then does she flinch. They're going to be _so_ disappointed. They won't be angry, but their sad, muted disappointment is worse than any anger could be. _We know you can do better, Rosa. You can be the bigger person. This isn't how we raised you._

She _could_  be the bigger person, but she doesn't want to.

Rosa says, tiny fists clenched in her lap, "Call them." 

*

At nine, Rosa Tamar Fisher nurses a slowly purpling black eye and a bloody nose at the edge of the playground. She's hiding behind some bushes, where she retreated after the fight to lick her wounds. Her glasses are crooked (not broken, thank god) and she's silently thankful that no one can see her crying. The tears aren't because of the pain, even though it hurts, but from frustration and humiliation. It's exhausting, _caring so much_  about everything, caring so much that she can't let things go when she sees something wrong. Not that the boy she'd stood up for even wanted her to.

Her parents are going to be very disappointed in her, but she's starting to get used to that feeling.

Rosa takes a deep breath. She might be bleeding but they are _not_  going to see her cry, no matter how much it hurts.

*

At eleven, Rosa Tamar Fisher is mostly constructed out of awkward gangly limbs, a pressing need to categorize and learn about _everything_  around her, and a simmering fury that's almost always ready to boil over.

Sometimes, when her parents leave her in charge and aren't around to worry too much, she'll take Aaron out in his wheelchair and they'll walk together through Rogers Park, which isn't that far from their house. She knows things aren't going well for their parents, both of whom are working extra hours like mad people to try to make up for the fact that everything costs so much, so she tries not to bother them when she can. She likes to tell Aaron about the trees and birds she's studied, and together, they're slowly memorizing the encyclopedia of names. "This is an American elm," she tells him. " _Ulmus americana_. And that's an American tree sparrow. _Spizella arborea_."

At the sound of her voice and the creek of wheels on concrete,  _spizella arborea_  is airborn again, tiny wings pumping, and she can see Aaron's eyes tracking its flight, the smile twitching across his lips. She sits down on the bench next to his chair, holding his hand.

They both watch until it's gone.

*

At thirteen, Rosa Tamar Fisher becomes a bat mitzvah. 

She stands (on a step stool, so she can see over the podium) before the congregation of Temple Shalom, thick strands of frizzy hair escaping the bobby pins her mother used to attempt to tame it. En exercise in futility. Her glasses are thick as ever and when she looks out at the congregation, she focuses only on Aaron's face. When she looks back down at the Torah, she licks her lips, nervously, because she's terrified she's going to mess this up. So far she's made it through most of the service, but she's particularly nervous about her _parashah_ and the speech that will have to come after it. 

She's determined not to show it, even though she feels like she could puke all over the holy scrolls.

Her Torah portion is the last part of  _Ki Teitzei_ , which contains seventy-four of the Torah's six hundred and thirteen _mitzvot_. She reads of Amalek and the slaughter of the old and infirm, the stragglers. It's an accident of birth that she's assigned this portion, really, but somehow, it seems appropriate. She is named after two dead ancestors, women who perished in the concentration camps in Poland, one from each side of her family.

_Zachor_. Remember.

On the day she becomes an adult, she does not forget.

*

At fourteen, Rosa Tamar Fisher starts to run, and never stops.

It drives her parents crazy because she mostly does it at night, slipping out through her bedroom window and taking off down the street before they know she's gone. They always worry at the best of times, and the first time she did it, her father told her sternly that they'd almost called the police.

She's not entirely sure why she does it. Restlessness. Frustration. An attempt to quiet her brain until she can sleep. There's something satisfying in pushing herself to her absolute limit, feet pounding the pavement until her chest feels like it's going to burst and she's going to puke. She runs through the rain, through the cold, through the heat. 

She counts the miles like she counts the days until she can leave for college. Part of her is guilty about leaving Aaron with her parents and their quiet, crushing concern, but the other part of her is running as fast and as far as she can.

She'll come back to him, _for_ him, but it's never entirely the same after that.

*

At fifteen, Rosa Tamar Fisher has her first kiss. She's at a party for college freshmen, and she's something of an oddity there. Everyone is older than her, and seems far more mature. She had forced herself to go, to try to make friends.

The kiss is sloppy and messy and tastes like liquor. The boy kissing her is very interested in squeezing her in places she doesn't want to be squeezed. The boy doesn't stop when she asks him to stop, so she elbows him hard in the stomach until he does. 

She decides not to do this again, for some time, and retreats back to her dorm room.

*

At nineteen, Rosa Tamar Fisher finishes college with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and starts law school because after some thought, she's not entirely sure if she wants to be an engineer. Neither engineering nor law school are what she thought they would be. In law school, especially, as someone who'd always had things come easy, she not only has to _work_  for it, but what seem like the right and obvious, logical answers are often wrong. She stays up all night briefing cases, writing careful notes, and to her shame the words still desert her when her Property professor calls out, "Miss Fisher" and she's on the hook for however long Professor Rodriguez wants to watch her dangling.

She keeps running, so she doesn't have to deal with nightmares where she's forced to explain the Rule Against Perpetuities dressed only in her underwear. Between running, studying, and laying in bed feeling the universe's weight crushing down on her, there's not much time for anything else. She's so fucking tired, all of the time, but the minute she stops pushing herself is the minute that all of her carefully built efforts will come crashing down around her head.

She has no friends, but this isn't anything new. Law school isn't the kind of place that you _can_  make friends, she feels. The curve and the scarcity of decent 1L summer internships make everyone cut-throat. When her laptop dies a few weeks into the semester, no one will share their notes, and she's forced to re-brief the cases and remember what she can from her lectures so she won't be totally screwed for finals. If there's some kind of secret to it, which there must be, she has never relaxed long enough to learn it. 

Her one consolation is that her classmates probably don't have any idea how screwed up she is, because if there's one thing she's good at, it's hiding behind a mask. In a lot of ways she's not any different from that little girl fighting on the playground, licking her wounds where no one can see her.

"Rosa, honey, I haven't heard from you in weeks and I'm worried," her mother's voice on the phone when she finally picks up. Warm and familiar, but full of the anxiety that Rosa can barely manage herself, let alone for her mother.

"I'm busy, Mom," she replies. "It's a lot of work and I'm barely keeping my head above water."

"Well, I just want you to know that your father and I are thinking about you," her mother says. "We only want the best for you. We know what you're capable of."

"Thanks," she says, but she doesn't mean it, and immediately feels terrible, thinking of all of the things her parents have done for her and Aaron, the sacrifices they've made, and how ungrateful she is. 

Yom Kippur is particularly hard, that first semester. The school isn't closed, of course, but she takes the time off to go home, to her old shul in Medford. Her recitation of sins during the _amidah_  seem ridiculous when she lays them out so baldly (surely they're not _so_ bad), but there are so many of them that she's been hoarding in her heart over the last year. Being ungrateful, taking out so many student loans and not having a clear path to a career, not thinking enough of Aaron, not going home to visit because she couldn't take her parents' gentle worry, not working hard enough, not being _good_  enough. 

When they receive their first grades at the end of the semester, Rosa earns her first C and has a quiet panic attack by herself in her apartment. 

She keeps running, because that's all she can do.

*

At twenty-one, Rosa Tamar Fisher is studying for the bar exam. She tries to tell herself that it's just like any other law school exam, and she's already passed the MPRE, but it's so damned easy to get overwhelmed. She's fairly sure that her apartment looks like some kind of serial killer's lair, with all of the notes she's got stuck up to the walls to track her progress, to remind her of things she's forgotten.

When she sleeps, she dreams of bizarre factual situations even more strange than the ones in her study materials. Elaborate Rube Goldberg machine torts, where one action sets off a multitude of reactions ending in a catastrophic and almost comical injury. She wakes, gasping, and goes immediately back to studying. When she runs, she has the BARBRI materials on her headphones, drilling herself in estates, in fee simple and life estates, in defeasible estates and future interests. Instead of birds and trees, she drills herself over, and over, and over in legal concepts. She's not sure if it's helping, but she's determined not to fail. 

She _can't_.

If she passes the bar exam, she's going to enlist in the Army. It was a decision made on a whim, after all of her other options had fallen through, after the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office had decided to go in another direction. But she has a spot waiting for her. 

For once in her life, she thinks it might be freeing to have someone else tell her what to do.

*

At twenty-two, Rosa Tamar Fisher passes the New England Commonwealth bar exam and begins the JAG Officer Basic Course, but before she goes, she takes the long braid she's worn for her entire life and cuts it off. Cuts the rest of her hair, and immediately feels ten pounds lighter. It's a new Rosa who emerges from the train at Fort Lee, or at least, this is what she tells herself. 

After the brief stay at Fort Lee, now in Charlottesville, she goes back to school, but with purpose. They are re-taught evidence and ethics. She takes trial advocacy. Things that seemed abstract and distant in law school begin to slot into place in the real world. By the time they make it to Fort Benning, basic training is something of a relief. It's satisfying to be able to turn off her brain during PT, to be able to measure her success in a quantifiable way. So many pushups, so many sit-ups. Running two miles in fifteen minutes. There aren't as many women as there are men, but she likes those she meets. They're like her: even when joking, they all approach the courses with deadly seriousness. She learns how to fire a rifle, the correct way to address superior officers, and deployment tactics.

By the time she's done at Fort Benning, she feels a little like a polished, perfect machine.

For the first time in her life, she feels, strangely, like she belongs.

*

At twenty-three, First Lieutenant Rosa Tamar Fisher is in front of a military judge as trial counsel for the first time. She feels, strangely enough, the same way she felt while waiting to read her _parashah_  at her bat mitzvah. It's not that she's not prepared (there's an exhaustive checklist that she has of everything she's done on this case, from the preliminary stages through referral; she's already done the Article 32 hearing), it's just that she does not know what to expect, even though it's only a summary court-martial and she's fairly sure the judge knows she's _new_.

She fixes her attention on the judge, and begins her opening statement.

When she's finished with the trial, she goes back to her seat to take a drink of water, and it's there she notices a soldier in the galley seats, watching her with a lop-sided grin on his face. It would be inappropriate to glare at him, when she's supposed to be representing the government, so instead she levels a flat stare back and pointedly turns away.

The verdict is guilty, but the punishment is only thirty days of confinement. It's not a big victory, but she's relieved it's over. It's the first step; now all she has to do is keep going. It would have been _very_  embarrassing to lose the first case, and now she's got something to build on. Although she tries to tamp it down, she's _damned_  excited, and her chest is still swelling with warm pride. She starts to gather her materials when the soldier who'd been watching her approaches.

"Hello, Lieutenant," he says cheerfully.

She looks at his insignia and asks, "Lieutenant...?" It is not a greeting, but a question.

"First Lieutenant Solomon," he says. "I've been waiting to say something to you all afternoon."

"First Lieutenant Fisher," she replies, and does not shake his hand. "I was waiting to see if _you_  were on the docket." It's not true, of course, since officers can't be tried before summary courts-martial, and they both know it, but she wants him to know that she did not think very highly of him, having friends who ended up in this court.

"I was just here to support a friend."

"That's very... kind... of you."

"What can I say," Lieutenant Solomon says, flashing her a grin that wouldn't look out of place on a movie billboard. "I'm a nice guy."

"I have a very low opinion of _nice guys_ ," Rosa retorts, "especially after all of those Act 32s."

Surprisingly, Lieutenant Solomon laughs again, not at all offended. "Touche! First blood to Lieutenant Fisher. Give me an opportunity to catch up?"

Rosa presses her lips together in a thin line. She's still riding high from the adrenaline of getting her first conviction, the excitement of the day. It's the only reason (that's what she tells herself, anyway) that she agrees. It certainly has nothing to do with Lieutenant Solomon's soft brown eyes or pleasant smile.

*

At twenty-four, Captain Rosa Tamar Solomon is married. 

It's not how she thought it would happen, of course. Nate finds out that his unit's being deployed to China, and it seems the easiest way to stay together. In her deepest heart of hearts, she has the feeling that even if it hadn't happened that way, it would've happened eventually, and she doesn't regret the impulsive decision to ask him to marry her. She was coming up for her own deployment soon enough, and at least this way she can keep half an eye on him.

They're married by the Jewish chaplain on base, with two of their friends as witnesses, a week before shipping out. She feels a pang of guilt that Aaron can't be there to see it, and because she doesn't call her parents to tell them.

It's a hard year for both of them. Nate doesn't like to talk about what he's seen on the front, and she can't bring herself to ask. The broken souls that come through her general court-martial room are evidence enough that war ruins you, irreparably. She clings to the certainty of her position: that she is dispensing justice, that she is doing the right thing.

At first, when she starts vomiting in the mornings, she thinks it's due solely to stress. It's not until later that she realizes it's something else entirely. 

*

At twenty-five, Rosa Tamar Solomon watches the 6 o'clock news with her husband and holds her hand over her stomach, which is uncomfortably large now. It's never good news anymore. They both stare stone-faced at images of military units--men and women exactly like them--being deployed to contain the protesters, using force against American citizens. The camera lingers on the bloodied, screaming face of a woman as she's arrested and led away.

"What the hell kind of world are we bringing him into?" she says, her fingers clutching Nate's. He's sitting down on the couch next to her, his mangled leg unable to hold his weight long anymore.

"All we can hope for is that kids like him are going to make it better," Nate says. He's always been the more optimistic out of the two of them, despite the shadows constantly lurking behind his eyes these days. 

Rosa's laugh is bitter; she can't help it. "Whatever's left of it."

They name the baby Shaun, after Nate's father Samuel, who passed away during the worst of the New Plague. 

Shaun is chubby, smiling, and completely innocent, and Rosa's heart breaks every time she looks at him.

*

At twenty-six, Rosa Tamar Solomon's world ends with a bang rather than a whimper.

She watches the mushroom cloud cresting over the hills of Brighton, and thinks _my parents and Aaron are dead_.

Two hundred and ten years later, she wakes from a cryogenic sleep to find that Nate and Shaun are gone, too.

She pauses by Nate's body only to take his wedding ring, the metal cold against her palm. 

And she runs, and keeps running, because if she stops, it will all come crashing down.

It's the only thing she can do.


End file.
